Establishing the correct boards for your organization is critical for a successful Pinterest presence. Did you know you can also use secret boards, as well as community and staging boards, to maximize your engagement and management efforts? This post offers tips for both general board management and specific ways boards can be used to manage content.

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Our last Pinterest related post, Pinterest Optimization: The Value of a Pinventory, offered guidance for reducing unnecessary duplication, improving board focus and content, and better managing new pins. As part of our ongoing effort to create and share best practice tips based on our own experience, this post discusses board management and how to utilize
special boards to facilitate content management.  Should you need any assistance regarding how to implement these recommendations, please email us at pinterest@sminorgs.net.

Our next Pinterest post will offer additional recommendations based on what we’ve learned from our efforts to enhance ongoing management. If you’d like to stay abreast of our Pinterest updates, please follow our Pinterest Resources board. You can also subscribe to the SMinOrgs S.M.A.R.T. Blog to receive other great SMinOrgs content. 

- Sean Pearson, Assistant Community Manager

General Board Management

Board/Pin Balance. Finding the right board/pin balance is tricky. Too many boards and too many pins are both overwhelming for folks. Develop a strategy that makes sense based on your organization and its goals and objectives, as well as the interests of your target audience(s). Remember that, especially initially, less is more. And since your total boards and total pins will increase over time, you should be prepared to tweak this balance as your Pinterest presence evolves.

Naming Boards. Board names should be broad, while capturing the essence of the content. Two key points to remember:

• Keep your board name to 22 characters or fewer, so the name displayed on the main board page won’t be truncated.
• Occasionally you’ll realize you need to change the name of a board. When you do, remember that board URLs include the specific board name, so changing name will break all links to that board. Therefore, it’s a good idea to track where you reference specific boards (e.g., in a blog post) so the links can be updated when the URLs change.

Note: Pin URLs aren't uniquely associated with your account and don't change, so you can move them between boards without worrying about breaking their links.

Board Order. Plan your board order so that your most important boards are in the top two rows, as these will be the first that users see when they visit your board page (with the board in the center being the most predominant). It’s probably a good ideas to record the layout you create (e.g., in your Pinventory), so you can refer back to it if the order should accidentally change.

Content Management

Secret Boards. Secret boards only appear to the owner of the account, and items pinned to secret boards do not show up on any activity stream. For organizations, secret boards can be very useful for checking pins and establishing a pinning queue. We recommend creating boards like Pins to Check and Posting Queue, along with these tips:

• If you have multiple people logging into your account, one person should be responsible for overall management (including managing your Pinventory) and should be the only person to post directly to the public boards. Everyone else should post to the secret boards.
• From the Pins to Check board, the Pinterest manager should verify the pins are not duplicates, establish their provenance (i.e., trace them to their original source), and edit the captions as needed. Then they should then add the pin to the Pinventory and then moved to the Posting Queue.
• To ensure a steady stream of activity, periodically move content from the Posting Queue to the relevant public boards. Note: When you move a pin from a secret board to a public
  board, it does not appear in your activity stream, so your followers may miss that this pin is new. To avoid this problem, you’ll want to post the pin as if it’s “new” while retaining the edits you made to your copy. 

Community Board(s). Community boards are a great way to establish a place for anyone in your community to engage with you. Take the opportunity to invite like minded people to pin to a community board. Community boards are not without risks, however: there is a strong possibility for duplicate content, for example, as well as pins that are off topic, poor quality, and/or of dubious origins.  Here are some tips:

• To make it easier to control content posted to your boards by others, you may want to consider having only one community board (which is what we have done).
• Keep your community board clean by deleting duplicates, removing inappropriate pins, etc.
• Pins you want to keep can be kept in the community board or relocated to one of your focused boards. Note: Since you can’t technically move the pin, you’ll have to repost the pin as if it’s “new,” being sure to give credit to the person who shared it with you.

Staging Boards. You may have content that fits into multiple boards but is popular in its own right (e.g., infographics). A good way to manage that content is to create a staging board where all content of that type goes initially, which allows followers to see the pins before they get sorted. After a period of time (e.g., a week), you can move the pins to their final home (and update the Pinventory!).

Come Pin with Us

There are many ways for people to engage with us on Pinterest and contribute to the ongoing evolution and success of our presence there:

• Follow one or more of our boards. We follow back! We check out every Pinner who follows us and follow any boards they have that are focused on social and digital technologies.
• Repin our content to your own boards. We’ll thank you with a like and/or a comment.
• Like/comment on our pins. It’s a great way to let us know what you think.
• Suggest pins for us by adding @SMinOrgs to your own pins.
• Tell us about some of your favorite Pinners by sending a message to pinterest@sminorgs.net.
• Become an SMinOrgs Pinner by requesting access to our Community Pins board. Just send an email to pinterest@sminorgs.net with your request. We’d especially love people to share their own original images for our Digital Era Images and THIS is Social Media boards. 

Also Check Out 

To learn more about SMinOrgs’s Pinterest presence, check out the following:

• Pinterest for Professional Purposes? Not as Preposterous as it Sounds!
• Pinterest: 8 Pointers for Organizations
• Pinterest Optimization: The Value of a Pinventory